Wasting time on Twitter the other day (!), I stumbled upon a tweet about a book that sounded so intriguing I just had to reach out to the author and ask if I could interview him. I was so delighted when he agreed! So, please say hello to J. Ashley Smith…
Hi J! Please tell us a little bit about your latest book, The Attic Tragedy
The Attic Tragedy is set in an antique shop in a fictionalised town in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. It’s the story of two girls, outcasts, brought together by a violent incident, who forge a friendship in trauma, a painful friendship that doesn’t mean the same thing to both of them.
At its heart it’s a story about the choices we make: either to grow into the person we most deeply are, whether we like it or not; or to flee from that person and become something less-than as a result. It’s also about memory and forgotten things, about the ghosts trapped in old objects, the ghosts trapped in prisons of flesh. It’s about the liberating nature of sadness.
Did you always want to be an author?
Yes. And no.
I was probably ten or eleven when I first started thinking about writing stories. I was very into Stephen King at the time and have a clear memory of having this idea for a story – which, on reflection, was probably just a shameless rip-off of something of his I’d read. I never wrote it, of course, but I thought about it a lot, imagined writing it, and knew that in doing so I would become ‘a writer’. I did write a bunch of very short, very gory skits around that time, but didn’t start writing seriously (by which I mean, ‘writing with intent to complete’) until I was about eighteen and on my way to university.
I wrote a lot at uni and in the years after, but got side-tracked by being in bands. Throughout my twenties, my creative biorhythm was split between making music and writing: I would glut myself on one until I was sick to the back teeth with it, then escape into the other for another spell of months, then toggle back again, and so on. I had these two very clear, very distinct but contradictory ideas of what I wanted to do and be, which seemed, because I have a tendency towards dramatic extremes, to be mutually exclusive. I was always busy, always working on something, but wasn’t – in terms of finished projects – very productive. Then I moved to Australia and didn’t write a word of fiction for ten years.
It was the birth of my second son that prompted me to start writing again. And, to cut a long story abruptly short, here I am.
What inspires you?
I’m quite feeling-oriented, so it’s often the mood that a certain place or image conjures for me that will inspire me to pursue it. When we first moved to Canberra, we lived on the edge of the suburbs, backing onto the bush. From the Hills Hoist washing line, you could see the dark hump of Mount Majura and gardens criss-crossed with telegraph wires. It was a wonderful, desolate view, that always gave me an empty feeling – a pleasing sort of emptiness, very much alive with mystery. Just trying to chase that feeling evoked a whole story, The Moth Tapes – and other stories often follow a similar trajectory.
Pulling away from triggers in the outside world, what inspires me most – or perhaps, what underpins all my inspiration – is a kind of longing to connect with whatever is buried deepest within me. To explore those half-hidden, shadowed spaces of the imagination, which are darkest because furthest from the light.
How many books have you written so far?
Written? Or published?
The Attic Tragedy is my first published book (if you discount stories in magazines and anthologies), but I have a stack of books written, of various lengths and in various states of disrepair. Somewhere, I still have all the half-started novels of my twenties – slowly degrading on an ancient floppy disk, perhaps, or some other medium impossible to access with contemporary technology.
In the year or two before I moved to Australia, I wrote the first draft of a novel, which I sincerely intended to finish in the months after I emigrated. I didn’t account, though, for how much the move would take out of me, how much mental energy it would take to build a life on the other side of the world. That book sat in the back of my mind like an indigestible lump; something that I couldn’t let go of and which I couldn’t get past. In the end, I had to ritually – and literally – burn it, to allow myself to have other ideas and to start writing again, free of the burden of that unfinished thing.
In terms of books that I would actually want others to read, I have two recent novellas – one of which, Ariadne, I Love You, is coming out from Meerkat Press next year – and a mostly finished novel. About which, more below…
What’s the next project?
I’m on the home stretch of a suburban suspense novel I’ve been writing on and off for the last few years – imagine if Patricia Highsmith had written Lord of the Flies. It’s set on an Australian beach holiday and is about an eleven-year-old sociopath coming into her full power. I hope to have it wrapped by the end of the year – but I’ve been saying that since 2016, so…
What made you leave England and move to Australia? What do you love about living there?
Love! Of course. I met my future wife and fled Old Blighty without a second thought.
It wasn’t until I moved to Australia that I realised how constrained life is in the UK. There’s this huge population crammed into a not very large island, there’s the entrenched class structure, all the trappings of a crumbling empire. It’s so much harder to carve a niche for yourself there – at least, that was my experience. Australia’s far from a utopia, and it has its own faults and flaws by the ute-load, but there’s space here and a willingness to give things a go.
And there’s true wilderness in Oz. The UK has some places of incomparable beauty, but you’d be hard pressed to find a spot, in even the most desolate spaces, from which you couldn’t see or hear a road. Before we moved to Canberra, we lived in an old weatherboard cottage in the Blue Mountains (where The Attic Tragedy is set), backing onto the National Park. If the bush there weren’t impenetrable, we could have walked out the back of our property into an ancient valley forest that stretched unbroken for tens of kilometres – the kind of wilderness where you’d die of exposure or starvation long before you found your way out again. And Australia is brimming over with this kind of wildness. You could spend your life exploring it and hardly even scrape the surface.
Best of all, though, at least in Canberra, even when it’s cold the sun is still shining.
I read that you “lost 15 years to the indie music scene”. I’m intrigued! Can you tell us more?
I was in a band at university, called Superfine. I studied film and creative writing, so was fully pumped to become either a film editor or a scriptwriter when I left. But the band got a record deal not long after I graduated, so I got a little distracted by that.
Superfine – famous for ten seconds as (debatably) ‘the first band in the world to release a single by email’, lasted only a couple of years beyond the first record we released. We recorded another, but then the label went under and we’d all been flogging that particular horse too long to keep it going.
A friend and I from home started another band shortly after. That was more of a bedroom project, and started out as just the two of us and a four-track recorder. The first song we taped, really just a demo, was played by Steve Lamacq on his radio show. And then we had interest from a label and had to get a proper band together. That band was called Donderevo – named after a ‘space doctor’ from Fred Pohl’s The Reefs of Space, which I was obsessed with at the time. We made a few records together – you can probably still find some of the tracks on YouTube if you look it up. But then I quit to commit to writing and moved to Australia.
In my ten-year “I’m a writer but I’m not writing” hiatus, I was also involved in a fantastic project, initiated by one of the ex-members of Donderevo – a musical collective, called The Intercontinental Music Lab. We recorded eight albums over a period of years, all in the same way: coming up with a theme for the album, we’d each separately record the backing track of a song and give it a title or topic; then the song would be reassigned to a different contributor, who wrote and recorded the rest of the song. It was kind of like the game ‘consequences’, only with music. Some of the albums were downloaded by millions of listeners, which was a blast – the kind of success we’d dreamed of in all those other bands.
I still pick up a guitar when I’m distracted, or have a bash on the drums when I need to work off some tension. But I’ve learned to focus all my energies in one direction and these days that direction is writing.
Congratulations on winning several writing awards. Can you tell us a little about that?
Thank you. What can I say? It was an extraordinary honour – and a big surprise!
The simplest way to sum it up is that for the last three years I’ve had stories shortlisted for Aurealis Awards – Australia’s premier speculative fiction award. In 2017, and then again in 2018, a short stories I wrote won first Best Horror then Best Fantasy. Thanks to the awesome power of crippling imposter syndrome, it’s felt like a mistake or an accident each time.
I was shortlisted again this year (for The Moth Tapes, which I mentioned earlier), so I’m forced – reluctantly – to concede that it may not be a fluke. I don’t have any expectation of winning – there are some wonderfully talented and deserving friends on the shortlist – but it’s a great privilege to be recognised in that way.
What do you think is the best thing about being an author?
The work. Hands down.
Having the opportunity to swim in the dark waters of the imagination, to pursue impossible ideas, to commune with made-up people that seem more real than one’s own friends or family is, frankly, incomparable. The thought that those same characters, ideas and imaginings can be experienced by others, simply by sticking a bunch of words in this or that order, is even better. It’s magical.
Thanks so much, J!
About J. Ashley Smith
J. Ashley Smith is a British–Australian writer of dark fiction and other materials. His short stories have twice won national competitions and been shortlisted six times for Aurealis Awards, winning both Best Horror (Old Growth, 2017) and Best Fantasy (The Further Shore, 2018). His debut novelette, The Attic Tragedy, is out now from Meerkat Press.
J. Ashley Smith lives with his wife and two sons in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.
You can connect with J. at spooktapes.net, or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
For more bookish stuff, visit my Books Page or check out some of my other author interviews.
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